‘The love from a New Yorker is like a big fat smelly rat putting its arms around you,’ Madonna told the Brooklyn crowd at her U.S. tour launch.
Hello, Brooklyn. Is Madonna in the house? It’s after 10 p.m. on Wednesday night, and the Material Girl is nowhere to be found on the first hometown stop of her career-retrospective “Celebration” tour.
The promenade down memory lane — by Madonna, for Madonna — kicked off in London in October, and is now belatedly on its North American leg (which, as anyone reading this probably knows, was scheduled to launch last July but was postponed just weeks before after the singer was found unconscious, reportedly due to a bacterial infection). So some people have been waiting six months for this show. If only Madonna would — to quote another great poet of his time, T.S. Eliot — hurry up please, it’s time! Or, to quote Madonna herself: Time goes by so slowly for those who wait…
The vibe inside the Barclays Center had started off with puffs of pot smoke and Fire Island-circuit, party-ready club music curated by DJ Honey Dijon. Costumed fans decked out in glitter, Madonna T-shirts, hoodies and even a “Like a Virgin” wedding dress grew increasingly impatient. It’s a power move for a stadium artist to keep his or her concert-goers waiting … and waiting … and waiting, and it’s certainly one that Madonna is (in)famous for. But this isn’t the ’90s, and New York is no longer the city that never sleeps. People were starting to get drowsy. Those gummies had started to kick in.
Finally, at 10:45 p.m., the evening’s host, Bob the Drag Queen, sauntered onstage in a pink Marie Antoinette-like ruffled gown. As he invited fans to travel back to 1978 New York City, with “Madonna at 19 years old,” he declared, “This is not just a show. This is not just. This is not just a partttty. It’s a celebration, bitches!”
And with that, Madonna manifested herself in a black kimono, gyrating to her hit “Nothing Really Matters,” from 1998’s “Ray of Light” album, undoubtably one of her best records. Despite being a get-on-your-feet dance party, Madonna’s mind on this greatest-hits tour seemed to be fixated on one theme: time. It’s perhaps the only thing that this perfectionist can’t control. Before the show was over — at the very late hour of 1 a.m. — Madge had not only marveled at her 40 years as the queen of pop, she’d pretended that she was a young teenager who couldn’t get into a club (as if a bouncer wouldn’t know the name Madonna), mourned a dancer lost to a drug overdose during “Holiday,” and even shimmied with the Grim Reaper while belting out the Bond theme “Die Another Day.
